Black walnut gelato, page 132-133

I've tackled the first of several gelato recipes in the book finally. This weekend we tried out the black walnut gelato. Here's the Cliff Notes version: blend to a paste the nuts, add to scalded milk, run through cheesecloth, cool, add sugar, maple syrup and yolks, heat, cool, freeze.
I tried to follow the directions to the letter but looking back I did omit the part where I was supposed to rub the black walnut skins off. And, I bet that was a crucial step.
The ice cream set up nicely and was very strongly flavored. It had a bitterness that I think was from the leaving the skins on.
It's the kind of ice cream that one doesn't want a cup or two of, but a nice scoop with a cookie on the side. Bernadette recommended serving this ice cream with spicy lace wafers and I wanted to, but ran out of time to make them.
I like making the gelato. It's a nice recipe to make if you have several hours before you are going to serve it and can let the ingredients heat and cool like they are supposed to. It's not that it's too time consuming. There just has to be enough time to let it cool a few times.
I remember once eating four black walnut ice cream cones at the Gasconade County Fair. At 25 cents per cone it was just too cheap and yummy to pass up. This gelato was different from that and all other black walnut ice cream I've had in that there were no pieces of nut, the nuts had all been strained out. The gelato is to black walnut ice cream like jelly is to jam, I guess. 
Lessons learned from this recipe, besides take the nut skins off--call it gelato or whatever, black walnuts in ice cream rocks!

Carlos and Tracey enjoying some black walnut gelato.

Holiday bow ties with sun dried tomatoes and toasted pecans, page 140

The day after Thanksgiving we had family and friends back over for dinner. What to serve 18 folks for an impromtu meal? Let's check the book. There was one nut pasta dish I hadn't made yet and I wanted to dive back into our Woods To Food project since furious house renovation/holiday prep was behind us. So I made holiday bow ties with pecans and sun-dried tomatoes. Yet again, I've been saving this recipe back a bit. Somehow I wasn't jumping at the idea of tomatoes and nuts combined. But, hey, I didn't have time to thaw meat and we had most of the ingredients in, so this vegetarian recipe it was.

The dish is pretty simple-olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, hard cheeses, pecans, garlic and salt served with pasta.

Yowsers, it's a better dish than it sounds, at least it was for me. The toasted pecans were somewhat lost in the rest of the sauce but definitely added a feeling of robust, substaintialness to the pasta. There's a lot of garlic in the recipe. For 18 people I made a triple batch and think that came to 12 cloves.

It seemed like the dish was enjoyed by all, well all except my nephew who is allergic to nuts and frustratedly asked me, "Who planned this meal?" when he realized there were nuts in the salad and in dessert as well. Oops. He had to suffer through pasta with cheese and some old key lime ice cream we scavenged from the freezer, left because none of the rest of us were what you'd call crazy about it.

But, besides him the dish got rave reviews and I'd have to agree. It's one I'll want to make a mental note to make again for sure.

Thanksgiving

Did we make a bunch of wild food for Thanksgiving this year? Survey says: NO! The couple weeks before Thanksgiving were a frenzy of projects to bring to a close a remodeling project we were doing. And, honestly when we were elbow deep in wall paper removal, painting and picking out faucets and such, I was pretty proud to get Ramen noodles on the table. Cooking Wild . . . had to wait a bit. But, Wednesday evening at 5:30 pm the contracter left, we swept up dry wall dust and by 7:30 pm my sister and family were piling in for the holiday. Did I feel a little guilty when my asthmatic niece started weezing from the dust that was not cleaned up yet? Yes sirree.
Every year we have a large Thanksgiving meal with my immediate and extended family at our house. My job is to provide the venue, throw some sweet potatoes in the oven, and that's pretty much it. Everybody that comes brings their specialty dish so it's not too burdensome on any one of us. I did make my first repeat recipe out of the book this year for Thanksgiving, though. I made the pear pecan upside down gingerbread cake again, and yes it was well recieved.

Approved Methods

With the pressure off for deer season, I might try some hunting that is more challenging than my trusty Browning 30-.06. Maybe I’ll go for a second one during muzzle loader season. Or maybe I’ll give my Marlin Camp .45, or even a handgun, a try during antlerless season.

Permissible hunting methods cover a wide range of weaponry. Crossbows are OK, but only during firearms season, or for people with disabilities. Atlatls, which are basically handles used to chuck spears, are also OK. If you have to use an Atlatl to make your deer hunting challenging enough, either you’ve perfected the art of hunting, or there are way too many deer on your hunting grounds.

One method I won’t be using is a: “Air-powered gun, .40 caliber or larger, charged only from an external high compression power source (external hand pump, air tank, or air compressor).” (from the MDC website under approved methods.)

I’m a gun guy. I kind of love them. I used to subscribe to gun magazines. I’ve been to a lot of gun shows. I’m friends with several gun dealers. Yet, the only large caliber air-powered gun I’ve ever seen is the cattle gun used by the psychopath hit-man played Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. I was no less surprised to see this as an approved deer hunting method than I would have been to see “Up to four extendable, mechanized arms not to exceed 200 feet in total length” listed as a method after having watched Spiderman 2.

A quick Internet search will turn up so high-powered air guns that are considerably more refined than cattle guns. They look like firearms, and are accurate at long ranges. I suppose that if I were forced into a duel, I would certainly choose one over an Atlatl.

  

Doe, a deer, a female deer...

Being out of venison and having multiple venison recipes in Cooking Wild in Missouri, I felt some pressure going into this deer season. I went to my parent’s farm, and took the season a little more seriously than usual.

Opening morning I was out before dawn, even though I was exhausted from checking in for duck hunting on four of the previous six mornings. It was a little chilly before sun-up, so it felt like deer season. And I experienced my usual opening morning routine of hearing shots ring out from distant hillsides just after first light, while I sit for a couple hours, seeing nothing but a skunk.

When I got chilled enough, I took a walk. I met up with my nephew Eric, and he gave me a ride back to my truck. On the way back, he looked to his side and noticed a deer running parallel to us, a couple hundred yards away. He stopped the Kawasaki Mule, and got out and put up his rifle, as did I. He ID’d it before I did. “Nope, it’s a small buck,” he said. I then had it in my scope, and I agreed. It was at least a four pointer, maybe a six, but not an eight.

Many counties in Missouri now have a four-point rule, including the county that I was hunting in. Any buck taken must have at least four points on one side. That rule saved this young buck’s life.

I took another walk later that morning, and jumped up a doe along a creek bank, but didn’t have a good shot at it. My father and brother were harvesting milo, at least they were doing that when they weren’t repairing the combine, and it seemed like they would be likely to run out a deer. I watched the first round, but it looked to me like it would be difficult to predict where the deer would run out, so I gave that up as a method. Good thing, too. They ran the field all day, finishing up with the lights on, and didn’t see a deer in it all day.

However, toward the end of the day, my father was waiting at the grain truck for my brother to fill the tank on the combine, and he decided to go sit in the woods and see if he might see a deer. He got out his gun, and started to walk to a spot by a tree, and three deer ran up to him. We’re pretty sure that they were the same deer that Ann and the boys had seen running away from the county road minutes earlier.  He fired one shot and got it. This was minutes after I left that same field, after having been hunting all day. Dad hunted approximately two minutes or less and had a deer. I heard his single shot from another part of the farm, where I sit and saw nothing.

But all was not lost. I followed my Dad’s advice and picked a spot on the edge of the field. Just after sundown, a big doe stepped out into the field and I got it. Dad had just finished field dressing his, so we hauled this one up the house and strung it up on the tractor, and I field dressed it, just before sitting down to a fantastic dinner that Ann made. Then my brother and I took both deer to a local processer that will butcher and package a deer for $65, a real bargain if you ask me, and we got to take two deer at once. In retrospect, it was good that I didn’t get one at first light, because I enjoyed the rest of my hunting. It was a good opening day.

Four P coffee cake with persimmons, pears, paw paws and Pecans, pgs 160-61

 I've been excited about making this coffee cake since I got the book in August. First, in late summer we got the paw paws and froze the pulp. Later in the fall, we picked persimmons. Next, we got pecans from an orchard in Columbia. And, twice now I've bought pears to soften for the recipe only to let them spoil before I could take the time to make the cake. Bother. But, now I think the stars are finally lining up and I'm ready to get this job done. As far as I know this is the recipe with the most wild ingredients in the book. Well, pears are certainly not native trees, but are hardy enough that you can often find old fruit-bearing pear trees around old home sites with buildings long rotten and sunk back to the earth. My pears, however, and are from ye old grocery store.

Once I made it, however, I was something just on the positive side of disappointed. My cake came out, well, certainly edible but not something anyone took seconds of. And I noticed my huband and I were the only ones going for it at breakfast the next morning, and we only took wee small pieces. I wonder what  went wrong? I loved the thought of the recipe, being 4 P and all, but I'd put the cake somewhere in the it's ok category, not the love it category. It was dupper dense and filling. I gave my mother-in-law a very large slice of the cake (we were visiting her when I made it) and then felt sorry for her after I had a bite and realized how filling it was. Have you ever tried to eat something way past being full? I remember someone serving homemade cheesecake to me in pieces the size of pie, like about a sixth of the cheesecake. It was killer. I was so full  but wanted to put it all down my gullet so the maker felt it was appreciated. It was pumpkin cheesecake. My, it's still so vivid in my memory. Anyway, I think that's the way Dorothy felt with the cake I made.

I toasted some slices for breakfast and thought that helped. Perhaps I didn't bake it enough. Perhaps the paw paw or permissons weren't the right consistancy and the baking powder just couldn't make the cake rise. Not sure. But, I do know that after I picked and depulped persimmons and paw paws, deshelled pecans, ripened and cut up pears, zested two oranges, juiced a lemon and whatever else the recipe called for, the cake should have turned out better than it did. I'd love to try someone elses attempt at this recipe. Personally, I'm now all out of paw paw, c'est la vie.

Zimmerschied, page 130

Made these German brown sugar cookies with black walnuts this week. The recipe calls for a whopping cup of black walnuts. Have you ever had black walnuts? They are the kind that grow in Missouri, not the English walnut with the smooth shell you see in stores during the holidays. English walnuts are what is used in most store-bought cookies that have walnuts. Black walnuts have a much more distinct flavor. In fact, if you have never had them, I would imagine a person would find them too potent on their first taste. But, once you acquire a taste for black walnuts, you become crazy for their unique taste. They are so real, so Misssouri, so old-school American natural flavorful non-generic what you picked as a kid and what your grandparents and their grandparents ate - just right.

This recipe seemed old in a good way to me. Butter, brown sugar, vanilla, flour, backing soda, salt and nuts. That’s it. Sounds like something Laura Ingalls Wilder would have made.

And, sometimes simple ingredients can make for the most flavorful, interesting recipes. These cookies are crunchy and very, very tasty. I love them. Everyone did. I made them for my folks who were visiting and they were 100% crazy for them, too. We sat by the woodstove eating these cookies and feeling very treated and content.